]]>Sleep tight and don’t let the bed bugs bite is a phrase many of us heard during childhood and, later, paid little attention to once we became adults. But according to Orkin – the Atlanta-based pest control company – there are more people affected by bed bugs in the United States now than ever before.

That’s especially true in our area. According to the latest Orkin list of the Top 50 Bed Bug Cities Baltimore and Washington D.C. ranked No. 1 No. 2, respectively, among cities metro areas where the company performed the most bed bug treatments from December 1, 2015 – November 30, 2016.

For those lucky enough to have never encountered bed bugs, they’re flat, reddish brown tiny pest that feed on blood (humans are their favorite). Don’t let the name fool you. Bed bugs are not limited to only beds. They can be found within the crevices of furniture, headboards, electrical outlet sockets, luggage & even in unsuspecting places such as bathroom vents & public transportation seats.

Despite how awful the thought of having bed bugs appears, treating these bugs are more of an inconvenience then a serious health concern. Yes, when they feed, bed bugs do leave behind itchy welts on their victims. However, there is no substantial research indicating that bed bugs transmit diseases.

One of the main reasons people hate bed bugs is that treatments in most cases require throwing away the infested items, such as mattresses, sheets, clothes and other costly household items.

The treatments in itself are not expensive but costs can mount if repeated treatments are required.

Under the Virginia Residential Landlord and Tenant Act, landlords are held accountable for keeping an apartment unit safe and habitable. As a result, apartment owners find themselves spending and budgeting more money for pest control treatments annd bed bug mattress covers due to the huge increase of bed bug sightings.

In April 2012, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) issued Notice H 2012-5, which addresses pest infestations. With help from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), HUD encouraged Landlords to develop an Integrated Pest Management Plan (IPM), which serves as a guideline to prevent & control infestations.

Some key principles from the plan include, raising awareness through education, encouraging tenants to reduce the clutter that attracts bugs and to take precautions when brining in luggage, coats and other items that may have come in contact with bed bugs outside the home.

]]>Election observers have long lamented the fact that only roughly half of registered voters cast ballots in presidential elections, and even fewer vote in other races.

A 2008 study by Stanford University researchers Joshua Harder and Jon A. Krosnick found that “an individual citizen’s turnout behavior is a joint function of his or her social location, his or her psychological dispositions, the procedures involved in voting, and events that occur at the time of each election.”

Translation: citizens with lower incomes and education are less likely to vote; married couples and people who participate in civic organizations are more likely to vote; convenient voter registration and polling site locations mean higher turnout and, lastly, significant events—like the 2008 recession—can affect turnout.

But up until today’s gubernatorial election in Virginia, my motivation was much simpler: I voted because of my mom.

My mother, Mildred L. Shiver, was a poll watcher for Fairfax County for more than 40 years.

When I graduated from high school, she insisted that I register to vote; when I was away in college in Syracuse, New York, she arranged to send me absentee ballots; and, after I returned to northern Virginia, she served as a poll watcher at various Mount Vernon District polling sites for every off-year and presidential election since Jimmy Carter.

The last time I cast my ballot in the presence of my mom was in June 2017, when I took her to vote in the Virginia primary election. Too sick to walk, she filled out a ballot from the passenger seat of my car while I went inside to vote. She died less than two months later.

I often encounter people in my travels who say they don’t vote because it doesn’t matter. “It’s all rigged; there’s no difference whether there’s a Democrat or Republican in office” one store clerk in Atlanta, Georgia recently told me, after he lamented the state of the area’s economy.

Indeed, few Americans trust the integrity of their elections.

A Gallup poll conducted two weeks before Election Day last year found that only 35 percent of Americans were “very confident” that their vote would be counted accurately, according to an article in the Washington Post written by Pippa Norris, Holly Ann Garnett and Max Grömping. That sentiment helped rank the United States 90th out of 112 countries, when people around the world were asked how confident they were in the honesty of their elections.

I’m not sure what fuels this sentiment. I know that my vote has made a difference. And I thank my mom for motivating me, all these years, to vote in every election. It’s a motivation I’m passing along to my two sons. I hope you encourage someone to vote today, and in every future election, as well.

]]>It is great to be back, after suspending our blog several months ago to complete our office move to a new location in Alexandria.
And as we settle in to welcome in a new year, we are thankful for the continued support of our tenant community as well as the contributions we have been able to make to affordable housing in Northern Virginia.
But to be honest, our social media skills grew, ahem, a little rusty during our off time. But that’s OK. To make up for it, we had a great new office celebration in October and a Christmas party in December to get back on track and show appreciation for all the craftsmen and women who worked on our new facilities.
Besides the building contractors, our own staff members and their families, a number of other notable folks attended the Shiver Management Group party in October including Virginia state Senator Scott A. Surovell and Mount Vernon-Lee Chamber of Commerce Executive Director, Holly Hicks Dougherty.
We want to thank them and everyone involved in our office move as well as our Office party celebration. We asked several of the office party attendees for their observations about the new office construction and thought we would share them with you.

Chang Soo Rhee: Office Project Architect – “The most challenging part of this project was connecting the two buildings together. I did not want to let Mr. Shiver down because you can tell the process of getting approval became frustrating.”
Julius Washington: Retired Employee – “It is a lot more spacious than the previous office. Overall it turned out better than I expected”.

Pedro Rivas: Electrical Engineer – Facilities Manager “Mark (Jackson) is a great leader; He will let you know if you mess up in a heartbeat. You need people like that when doing projects like this because there are so many aspects.”

Tadasha Culbreath-Shiver: – “It’s great to see an idea come into fruition after months of continuous labor and planning. The overall design is professional and looks comfortable for employees.”

]]>http://sm-group.com/rent/?feed=rss2&p=2160216Moving Our Officeshttp://sm-group.com/rent/?p=212
http://sm-group.com/rent/?p=212#respondMon, 06 Jun 2016 14:31:21 +0000http://sm-group.com/rent/?p=212We will be moving our offices over the next few weeks and hope to resume posting later this summer.
]]>http://sm-group.com/rent/?feed=rss2&p=2120212Women in Constructionhttp://sm-group.com/rent/?p=198
http://sm-group.com/rent/?p=198#respondFri, 06 May 2016 19:03:24 +0000http://sm-group.com/rent/?p=198…

]]>Although women working in construction numbered just 1.2 percent of the entire U.S. workforce in 2013, an increasing number of construction industry vendors that we do business with are headed by women or employ women.

Our experience is apparently an anomaly: Government statistic show that while women have made significant gains in other male dominated fields, including jobs such as firefighting, the gains in the construction industry have been painfully slow over the past half century. The share of women in such construction jobs as brick mason (0.1%) and drywall installers (0.3%), for instance, pales in comparison to the percentage of women automotive service technicians (1.2%), according to the U.S. Department of Labor.

The low numbers are surprising in an industry bursting with high-paying jobs that don’t require a college degree or much in the way of brawn–now that power tools and heavy equipment machines do most of the grunt work. What’s more, there is even a Fort Worth, Texas-based trade group lobbying on behalf of women in construction.

I sat down with a few of our female vendors to find out how they got started and what, if any, obstacles they faced.

Lydia Martinez is operations director of P & J Cable Construction, which installed conduit for telecommunications cable at one of our properties.

Born in California, she moved to Mexico at the age of eight and returned to the U.S. when she became 18. She started supervising the installation of underground conduit after a construction owner struggled to communicate with his mostly Spanish speaking laborers. For the past 15 years she has run her own conduit installation business with her spouse. Martinez mostly handles business negotiation with clients and helps her husband supervise the foremen and laborers in the field.

Although Martinez said the career break left her “blessed to have a great situation that allows me to work and still spend quality time with my three girls,” she says her career rise has not been easy.

“Some people reject the notion of a woman giving orders to a group of guys even if it’s for a bigger cause,” Martinez said. “I’m at a point in my career where I understand the circumstances. I tend to hold my tongue about a lot of things because I know my actions have consequences that may affect potential business opportunities.”

Nevertheless, Martinez is optimistic about the future for women in construction: “Believe it or not, more and more women are becoming laborers in my line of work,” Martinez said. “The best advice I can offer women entering the field is to never get discouraged in the face of adversity. Men will look at you differently until they see you handle your business as a professional despite being a woman.”

Carolyn Brown, a ceramic tile installer, who has remodeled bathrooms and kitchens on our properties and who has worked in the construction industry for 26 years, entered the field after studying the trade in vocational school. Fresh out of school, she started her career out with a team of six men. However, within a few years Brown decided it was too much responsibility to manage such a large group so she started her own business laying ceramic tiles.

“Being from a small country town in North Carolina, I was always engaged in tasks with my hands” so I loved laying tile, said Brown. The key to success, she added, is to “simply love what you do and put your best foot forward.”

]]>Nowhere is the nation’s affordable housing crisis more evident than in the rise of a phenomenon known as “ghost tenants,” or people attempting to live in government subsidized affordable housing, secretly, off lease.

At Spring Garden Apartments, the number of people caught in this illegal arrangement jumped to 10 last year from three in 2014 and just one in 2013.

The problem of “ghost tenants” is world wide and likely affects all types of apartments, as people double-up to save money on rent or take in a family member who has no place else to go. Though the problem is hard for landlords to spot and even more difficult to quantify, a recent article on Slate.com estimated that the actual “population living in New York City’s publicly owned housing units could be 25 to 50 percent larger” than the official count of 400,000 residents in the city’s public housing units.

The problem has been fueled by growing demand for affordable housing amid skyrocketing rents.

In Fairfax County, for instance, there are just 26 units of affordable housing for every 100 eligible extremely low income housing seekers, according to the Urban Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based research group.

Enterprise Income Verification, the main database tool that the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development requires landlords to use to ensure that only qualified low income families are eligible for affordable housing, isn’t really helpful in catching ghost tenants since these tenant are off the books and never provide personal information that a landlord can check.

So catching ghost tenants often becomes a game of cat-and-mouse or happenstance.

Some ghost tenants are outted by the mail carrier questioning whether to leave mail for an unfamiliar name; others are caught by maintenance staff when they carry out apartment inspections or repairs.

But some residents, perhaps unaware that ghost tenancy is illegal, behave as if they are the official tenant. We have had several come in the rental office after being locked out of their unit, for instance, and ask for a front door key.

“Well let’s see, we don’t recognize your name; do you live here?” is our usual response, before a lease violation notice is sent to the official tenant.

Like other Section 8 housing complexes, rents at Spring Garden Apartments are based on income. So when an individual moves in or out, the household income is reassessed and the rent—which is 30 percent of total income—is adjusted accordingly.

In the end, ghost tenancy spooks the real tenant more than the “ghost.” Punishment, ranging from eviction or a big increase in rent, is more often levied against the official tenant, not the person living in the unit illegally.

]]>It’s been nearly a year since the inception of this blog. So I thought we’d take a look back at what we have shared with our readers and what our readers have shared with us.

Since our first blog post on March 16, 2015, we’ve discussed topics ranging from solar energy and homelessness to the widening of Richmond Highway and the regulatory policies of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Although the posts in this space are what some might call a “group” blog, where I share writing responsibilities with the president of Shiver Management Group, Jube Shiver, Jr., it has, on occasion, been a very personal experience for me.

Take my post on homelessness.

The personal struggle my family and I had with homelessness when we first moved to Alexandria, Virginia 20 years ago was the first time I had talked about the experience on social media. The blog post drew the highest number of comments from our readers. Many of the comments were heartwarming, with one poster saying, “this story is appreciated and (is) truly an inspiration.”

Over the past year, the “literally homeless” population has decreased in the Washington, D.C. area, according to the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments. Nevertheless, I think we, as a community, must continue to raise awareness to combat homelessness.

Another public policy issue that we addressed was Jube Shiver’s post about vehicle traffic and pedestrian safety along Richmond Highway or Route 1.

The post drew a comment from Virginia State Sen. Scott A. Surovell, who said that “the 44th District averages double the pedestrian fatalities” than the rest of Virginia, on average. He added that if “U.S. 1 is going to be a thriving, safe and vibrant community,” policy makers and citizens need to keep the pressure on to make improvements to the highway as well as address alternative means of transportation.

According to Embark Richmond Highway, widening of the Route 1 will consist of six lanes and a Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) service, which is currently in the planning stage. Virginia Department of Transportation (VDOT) expects the $180 million, 3.68 mile segment of Richmond Highway from Telegraph Road to Mount Vernon Highway to be completed by 2020 and the BRT to be completed by 2026, which would be significant progress.

On the other hand, some of our blog posts triggered little response, despite raising what we believed were significant public policy concerns.

For instance, Julián Castro, Secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, told Jube Shiver in a March 2015 meeting that his staff would review what Shiver called an “unconscionable” HUD rule that barred college students younger than 24 from subsidized housing unless they had dependent children or were military veterans.

We never heard back from HUD and the college student ban remains.

Similarly, our blog post on solar energy was one of only two columns that drew no comments.

However, Sen. Surovell continues to work hard on solar.

Last month, he joined with several members of the Virginia House and introduced a bill that would require the State Corporation Commission to encourage so-called “community solar gardens,” where businesses or home owners share a solar array with grid-connected subscribers and receive financial credits, at discounted rates, on utility bills from the energy generated by the shared solar facilities. The measure supported by Surovell would additionally provide low income homeowners the opportunity to participate in these shared solar arrays.

Finally, we want to express our thanks to Verizon Communications, which responded quickly to last month’s blog accusing the company of dragging its feet for nearly a decade on installing cable TV and high speed Internet service at Spring Garden Apartments. After the blog appeared, Verizon crews worked nearly around the clock to install the service. As a result, Verizon’s cable TV and high speed Internet service, known as FIOS, is now available to all 207 families at Spring Garden Apartments and company officials are scheduled to talk to residents about the service in a tenant meeting later this month.

With a new blog being created in the world every second, according to Andrew Keen, author of the book “The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture,” I was skeptical about what impact we might have from our small soapbox on the Internet. But that sentiment has faded over this past year in the wake of the positive and thought-provoking feedback we have receive from you, our readers.

Over the coming year, we look to increase and improve communications with our tenants, vendors and homeowner communities. Thank you for your support and stay tune for future postings!

]]>A few months after Fairfax County gave Verizon approval in October 2005 to offer cable TV and Internet service in the county, a company representative visited my office and excitedly told me Verizon would be rolling out more than 300 cable channels and high speed Internet access in our area as soon as the summer of 2006.

Verizon did rollout fiber-optic broadband internet access, which it calls Fios, within inches of our apartment complex, which is located right off Richmond Highway, a main regional thoroughfare. But it never provided service to the mostly poor black and Latino residents that live in the apartment complex, although it hopes to do so this year.

Our experience with Verizon mimics that of poor and minority consumers in Newark, NJ, where tens of thousands of low-income households don’t have access to Verizon’s high-speed internet service, allegedly because of a loophole in state law that permits the communications company to withhold service when it claims it can’t gain access to the property.

Verizon has said that in New Jersey, many landlords voluntarily opted-out of Fios service and chose other broadband and cable TV providers.

In our case, we were eager to have Fios service. And Verizon initially seemed interested in providing it—that is, until they visited our site. What’s more, the company appears legally bound to provide such service to all Fairfax County residents.

In a 2006 filing with the Federal Communications Commission, for example, Fairfax County’s Office of Consumer Affairs stated that the country’s “three franchise agreements guarantee that deployment of competitive cable services and any upgrades of existing cable systems will be made available to all households within a franchise area.” When the county granted Verizon a franchise in 2005, it gave the communications giant seven years to build out its system in the county.

On December 15, 2015 I called and sent an email to Richard J. Young, Verizon’s director of external communications and media relations, seeking comment about why it has taken so long for Verizon to provide service to our site and also to enlist his help in speeding up the installation of Fios on our site. He did not respond.

Verizon only showed interest in wiring Spring Garden Apartments about three years ago after I called a friend of mine, who had been Verizon’s former government lobbyist. Within months, the company had engineers visit Spring Garden and had a site plan approved.

Since then, things have bogged down. We have had conduit and cable installed for Fios service. But the service has not been turned on and Verizon has not indicated when that might occur.

Having competitive broadband service is not just a matter of status and convenience, especially for poor consumers. The General Accounting Office (now the Government Accountability Office) stated in a 2003 report that “cable prices were as much as 15% lower in areas in which incumbent cable operators faced head-to-head competition from another wireline cable provider.” What that means is that while most Fairfax County residents have enjoyed the benefits of price competition between Verizon and the county’s other cable TV provider, Cox Communications, poor people at Spring Garden Apartments have not benefited from that competition for the last decade.

The practice of banks and other institutions circumventing black and Latino communities in favor of predominantly white neighborhoods, is called “redlining” and is often spoken of in the past tense. It is seen as a disparaged practice of a long-forgotten bygone era. But it takes vigilance to make sure the battles for equality our society thinks it has won, stay won. And we need to insure that lawmakers, regulators and businesses alike, embrace that view.

]]>http://sm-group.com/rent/?feed=rss2&p=1631163Season’s Greetingshttp://sm-group.com/rent/?p=158
http://sm-group.com/rent/?p=158#respondTue, 01 Dec 2015 14:00:08 +0000http://sm-group.com/rent/?p=158We hope you are enjoying the holiday season. Our next post will be in January.
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